Time

Today’s blog is something wot I have learned.

It’s about having kids. It’s not mind-blowing stuff, but it is the truth as I see it. If at any point this sounds like some kind of self-help mantra, give me a virtual slap, will you?

Anyway, it’s about when you decide to start a family. If you decide this is what you want, that is. And if it’s not just thrust upon you unexpectedly, thanks to too many Tequila slammers and your subsequent inability to open a condom packet.

You may well have very good reasons for putting off starting sproglet manufacturing. There are still lots of holidays to be taken, wild parties to have, and careers to forge, after all.

But you do need to consider something quite carefully. It isn’t always simple. In fact, a lot of the time it goes wrong. 

Miscarriages, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention. And that’s the problem: people don’t really talk about them. They’re the Voldemort of up-the-duffness. No one must utter the word, or mention it to someone thinking or planning to have a child. 

They happen. They’re one of life’s most miserable experiences, and tear away a part of yourself you can never properly repair.

You can’t forget. But you can move on. Just give yourself a chance by at least thinking a little more realistically about the time you might need. It took me 10 years of plucking up courage, false starts, disasters, emergencies, operations, and assorted brouhaha to brew up and tip out my second child. I’m mightily glad time was on my side.


Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as you wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think


Video is: The Specials - Enjoy Yourself

Lactivism

At first, I didn’t realise they were working together. They were so different. One was aggressive and contemptuous; the other was tender and concerned. “Right, come on now, you need to start doing this properly. You’re giving up too easily,” the first one snapped. When she left the room I gave the other a pleading look. She raised one eyebrow, sympathetically. “Please,” I said. “Can’t you help?” Finally, she nodded. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

It felt like an interrogation room scene in a film. I was under the care of Good Breast Cop, Bad Breast Cop. These were the nurses I was turning to for help after yet another attempt to breastfeed my new baby had failed.

Soon, my paediatrician realised my daughter’s floppiness, her inability to suck, and the blueish tinge around the mouth and to her hands and feet, were signs that something was seriously wrong. We were whisked away. To the Special Care Baby Unit. Bad Breast Cop couldn’t look me in the eye.

(Video clip: Good cop, bad cop scene from L.A. Confidential)

High

You've got to hand it to the NHS: they give you good drugs.
"How tall are you?" the anaesthetist asked, as I was about to be taken into surgery. I presumed he was checking the dose for the epidural. "5ft 5in," I told him, starting to feel a little spaced out from the injection. One of the nurses pumped the foot pedal to raise my trolley bed a little lower. I frowned, concentrating hard. "No, wait, I'm only about 5ft now."

My husband arrived wearing scrubs. "You're not effing doing it," I told him.

The consultant about to perform the emergency caesarian looked like Geoffrey Palmer, with those puffed-out, pompous jowls. There were about a dozen other people in the theatre, all scurrying about at his command. He wasn't happy. "This baby is breach. You must have seen your consultant last week. They really should have picked this up," he said. "Who was it?"
"You," I replied, causing a mass outbreak of coughing from behind his junior colleagues' masks.

I was shielded from the gory details by a green curtain. The top of me was shaken around by violent rummaging I couldn't feel. A cry. Then my husband was handed something. He passed it to me. A slimy, sleepy, beautiful wrinkled girl.

Perfect.

For a day, that's what we thought.

"Eight miles high, and when you touch down
You'll find that it's stranger than known
Signs in the street that say where you're going
Are somewhere just being their own"
(The Byrds - Eight Miles High)